During their growth, enterprises and organizations have gradually developed various independent or interrelated application systems to support daily execution and management thereof, such as transaction processing system, accounting system, ERP system, human resource management system, billing system, call center or the like. Today, as the information technique is evolving continuously, utilization of information by people tends to be increasingly complex. In addition to transaction processing operations such as adding, deleting, modifying transaction data or the like and obtaining a simple statistical summary on the transaction data, it is also required to perform various complex analyses such as long term tendency analysis, data mining or the like on data (historical or present) to support decisions.
A data analysis system is a computer application system which can convert data into information or knowledge, comprising online analysis, query and report, prediction and analysis, professional quantitative analysis, data mining, visualized data application, analytic customer relation management and the like. For example, Tableau developed by Tableau Software Corporation (North 34th Street, Suite 400, Seattle, Wash. 98103) is an example of such a data analysis system.
A typical data analysis system usually has to process a large amount of data. Different dimensions of information on the data are developed and exhibited by providing tools for defining and designing data analyses, or even means for directly programming, and combining visualization techniques such as graph or the like, thereby assisting analyzers to complete analyzing tasks better. Conventional data analysis systems can be roughly classified into two classes.
One class focuses on simplifying the execution of the analyzing tasks, to enable ordinary users to complete the analyzing tasks which have otherwise been completed only by professional analyzers as usual. This kind of analysis systems emphasize particularly on providing visual and easy interactive analyzing operations while presenting results of the data analyses. Users need not remember corresponding analyzing operations. However, there is a drawback that it is difficult to extend to and support flexible and complex analyzing tasks. Another class focuses on providing capability of flexible and complex analyzing tasks and scalability. This kind of systems are usually directed to professional analyzers and rely on users who are familiar with data analysis commands of specific analysis systems, thereby increasing requirements for ordinary users to utilize these systems.